Norman’s Law of eLearning Tool Convergence

Any eLearning tool, no matter how openly designed, will eventually become indistinguishable from a Learning Management System once a threshold of supported use-cases has been reached.

They start out small and open. Then, as more people adopt them and the tool is extended to meet the additional requirements of the growing community of users, eventually things like access management and digital rights start getting integrated. Boil the frog. Boom. LMS.

2 thoughts on “Norman’s Law of eLearning Tool Convergence”

So right on. I am seeing this all over again with a particular platform at the moment — I’ll be able to say more next week, but for now it is fair to say that you have nailed the terrible reality we all are faced with. Lean and agile becomes bloated and rigid so quickly. We make feature requests to make the toolsets look and act like things that can manage the use cases we’ve created and before we know it we’ve created a machine that actually works against the very innovation we showed up for. I have to say it is a perfect instance of, “this is why we cant have nice things.”